“You are not welcome in my nest,” I said. “Neither of you.”
The word arrived on my tongue before I had used it. Old. Instinctive. Mine in a way that had no explanation I could reach from where I stood.
Thane’s face shifted—something passing through it that was quiet and recognizing and gone before I could examine it. Malric’s eyes narrowed a fraction, and he said nothing.
I walked.
The tower’s hum changed under my feet as I moved up the stairs, the vibration sharpening, the air cooling against my flushed skin. The stones didn’t obstruct me. But the shift in the quality of the hum was unmistakable—something in thestructure pulling, resistant, the way a tide resists the shore that is moving away from it.
I kept my pace even.
Heat still coiled low in my belly, a slow and unwelcome reminder of Malric’s hands and the way his scent had broken through every barrier I had erected during dinner. My arm remembered his grip. My skin remembered his warmth.
I had spent years learning not to want anything I couldn’t have.
I was uncertain that the lesson was going to hold.
My nest waited at the next level, the room I had built from the tower’s offerings over decades—furs and cushions and layered warmth, the one space that had always been entirely mine. It had been my refuge because nothing threatened me there and nothing required anything of me there, and I had been the only thing breathing in it.
I stood in the doorway and looked at it.
Then I went inside and pulled the door shut, and sat in the middle of all that familiar warmth and tried to remember what quiet had felt like before two alphas had walked through the tower’s walls and the tower had simply let them in.
The hum beneath the floor didn’t stop.
It had not stopped since they arrived, and I didn’t think it ever would.
Chapter Six
MALRIC
The dining chamber felt too small after she left.
I stood where Aveline had abandoned us, her scent still thick in the air, honey and spice and silver blossom clinging to my senses like a brand I couldn’t scrub away. My hands flexed at my sides, the memory of her waist beneath my palm, the curve of her body against mine for those few heartbeats before she’d wrenched herself free. The tower hummed beneath my boots, disapproving, as if it could sense my frustration and found it wanting.
Thane hadn’t moved from his chair. He sat with his elbows on the table, head bowed, fingers threaded through his hair as if he could physically hold himself together. His scent had changed too—sharper, edged with something I recognized as distress, even though he was trying to hide it.
“She hates us,” he said quietly.
“She hates me,” I corrected, my voice coming out harder than I’d intended. “You, she let cry on her shoulder.”
His head snapped up, eyes flashing. “I didn’t?—”
“I know what I saw.” I turned away from him, pacing to the window, though there was nothing to see beyond the glass butdarkness and the faint outline of trees. “You wrapped yourself around her as if she were already yours.”
“She was terrified,” Thane shot back. “Someone needed to?—”
“Comfort her?” I finished, the word bitter on my tongue. “While I played the villain?”
Silence stretched between us, heavy and accusatory.
I pressed my palm against the cool stone wall, letting it ground me, letting the sensation cut through the heat still coiled in my gut. My body hadn’t settled since we’d entered this cursed tower. First the climb, her scent drawing us upward like a lure. Then seeing her standing there, wide-eyed and beautiful and utterly unaware of what she was doing to us. And now this—the aftermath, my alpha straining against control, Thane’s loyalty shifting toward someone who wasn’t me.
“There’s no way the king just appears,” I said, forcing my mind back to strategy, to something I could control. “He has to enter the same way we did.”
Thane made a noncommittal sound. “Unless he has a portal between here and the throne. He could have magic-users for that.”
I snorted despite myself, glancing back at him. “Maybe. Is that even possible?”
